I think that multitasking between multiple tasks has been somewhat-generally known to not be possible (for most people) for a while now. However, this part of the article was novel:
> Other studies suggest that people who frequently “media multitask” (like listening to music while checking email or scrolling through social media while watching a movie) are more distracted and less able to focus their attention even when they’re performing only one task.
This was novel to me. Listening to music negatively affects your ability to focus? I guess it's time to throw out my headphones...
Well, but that article links to "Multicosts of Multitasking"[1], which references studies made on "heavy multitaskers", defined as having high "MMI" scores. What's MMI?
"A high MMI score means an individual engages in a lot of media multitasking (e.g., checking email while also perusing Facebook and watching Netflix), and a low score means he or she does not (e.g., checking email without any secondary media)."
Whoa there - checking Netflix and Facebook are completely different than listening to music, and it should be obvious that the former two are mutually exclusive with performing other tasks (simultaneously) - but that doesn't imply the same for music.
I think that the HN submission page might be making some unsupported claims...
In my personal experience, listening to music is fine (and helps keep me on task while waiting for builds and tests and such) when I'm working on well-understood bits. But if there's something novel or complicated, I have to turn it off or else I just can't get into the right frame of mind.
I will build on it. Even type of music may make a difference in your mental state. Soothing background piano music may actually help your focus, while lyric heavy cadence of note distractions will do anything but since it is virtually designed for a distraction.
Anything with Lyrics wrecks my concentration. Somehow my mind just can't stop tracking speech. Instrumental is OK, but silence is too.
I know lots of people though who must have music on, or they simply cannot concentrate. For them, it might be that the music gives the mind something to hold on to, kind of a rail to help stay on track, and in the absence of that, their mind would wander farther afield.
> might be that the music gives the mind something to hold on to
The way it feels to me is it gives me a consistent background to work. For example, once I have decided on a particular way to solve a problem and its time to code - I put a long DnB track.
Another way to describe it is that it gives my brain's CPU a consistent clock, so to speak xD
YES. I can listen to things w/lyrics while doing CAD work; with any task requiring language, text, etc. it is too distracting, although some calm instrumentals are tolerable.
When I really get focused on a bit of work, whatever music is playing literally disappears - if you came to me 3min later and offered me $millions to tell you what song just played, I'd get nothing.
Cats are even more amazing - I can't find it right now, but I remember in reading studies in some of my college neuroscience classes where electrodes were put on cats to track their audio system with a clock/metronome sound in the background. You can trace the signal processing up through various nodes of the system at successively higher levels. When a mouse was let into the area, the metronome click trace disappeared from the data of almost every level of processing - it was entirely filtered out almost at the raw audio stage when the mouse showed up. That's focus.
I'm finding myself deep in black and doom metal while coding. Both genres are kind of droning with very saturated sound spectrums, the main diffrence is the tempo of the songs really. Most importantly though, the vocals are generally growled and very low in the mix. Absolute best is vocals in languages I can't understand. Clean vocals breaks my concentration.
One thing I've heard recommended, and enjoyed a bit myself, is to listen to music with lyrics in a language that you don't speak (at all, I'd say) - the (heavy conjecture) theory being that the foreign language isn't recognized and parsed as "speech", so avoids the language areas of the brain.
This is exactly it for me. For any task that has to do with words - writing, reading, code - lyrics are devastating. Even “lyric like” music, where an instrument is imitating speech for a track, grabs too much of my attention for me to focus.
For most tasks, lyric free chill hop is a perfect balance. It replaces the chaos of my environment with a predictable backdrop that can fade out of focus.
But for tasks that require extreme focus, like putting together a novel (to me) algorithm or exploring a new code base, even chillhop is too much. I have to find a place with absolute silence - anything that grabs my attention is devastating to the task at hand.
Agreed. I use brain.fm (no affiliation) and have found it great for focusing. While I ride around the city on a bike or euc, I find faster pace music great for getting in the zone / flow state.
For the latter example, I wonder how much of it is though neaural networks wired together fire together. In essence Ive always listened to music while riding so it feels right and known, what if I had ridden all this time without music, would I be better? I don't know.
I don't think you can make that kind of broad pronouncement here, lest your next step be to play classical music at plants to demonstrate some kind of preconceived superiority right?
For me it feels more about familiarity. If I already have the lyrics memorized then it does not feel distracting whereas unfamiliar music can draw my focus.
We are primed by nature to take anything social more important than everything else, except nature dangers. It makes totally sense to block out social cues "conversations" like lyrics to focus.
For me, it was always classical orchestral music when writing new code and hard rock/heavy metal when debugging. The other way around ruined my focus on either task.
That is my personal experience as well. The more familiar music is, and the better it matches my mood, the better it works as background for programming. When I was under a stress maximum, this (the whole CD) [0] blew away all distractions and got me super focused.
I experience exactly this as well. I liberally use my volume up and down keys.
Perhaps the following is too personal of a take, but we're talking about music YMMV ;-)
Here it comes:
Music doesn't make me feel lonely when I'm behind a computer. And feeling lonely is what made me into a mediocre programmer. For years I've not touched a computer because it just feels so isolating when you do it for 8 to 10 hours straight.
But with music, with music I feel a shared experience between me, the artist, the feelings and the concepts. It helps that this form of "musical reasoning" doesn't cost me a lot of brainpower since I've been doing this on autopilot since I was a kid.
Exactly this, I think music helps with energy/motivation to smash through a well understood but fairly uninteresting task, which outside of the HN Elite is most of our day to days.
For understanding a new concept or problem the finding here probably applies.
Maybe it's just my personal experience, but I find the reverse of that is also true. If the music itself is novel, I find it much harder to focus on the task at hand.
I've got about 50 albums that I rotate through while I'm coding and I can focus on the task at hand fairly well with those on, but if I put on a new album by an artist I like, my ability to concentrate on code goes way down.
Yeah, at some point music that you are familiar with becomes background noise. I used to be able to sleep to Loveless by My Bloody Valentine at high volume. I used it to drown out other sounds when I had loud neighbors in an apartment on the bus line. When you listen to something that often, your brain just ignores it.
This reflects my experience as well. When I more or less know what I’m doing (where my typing is essentially the rate limiting step), playing familiar music helps me to focus, but when I really need to stop and think about what I’m trying to accomplish, I prefer as much silence as possible (I’ll even switch from headphones to large hearing protection earmuffs, the kind you should wear if you’re working with heavy equipment).
Listening to music is bad if you're in city traffic and need to use all your attention, but good if you're on a country road and risk just losing focus.
I think they also need to control for a lot of different elements here that they probably haven't in their subject group and methods. Including neurodivergence, but also how engaging the task is.
It's not uncommon to hear claims from neurodivergent people about achieving optimal stimulation levels to perform a task. That can be increasing stimulation with music or motion, or decreasing it by blocking out sound with ear plugs. I've seen these play out and it seems to work. I think it's also safe to assume that someone wearing noise cancelling headphones is swapping one set of sounds for a quieter or at least less distracting one. If in fact they aren't just tuning people out by wearing headphones and not playing anything.
And even neurotypical people can maintain throughput on a boring task by accompanying it to music. Laborers and militia just being the most obvious in media. I've talked to a couple of neurodivergent people who admit to "singing" a song in their head while working. Just because you don't hear the music, doesn't mean there's no music.
No study will convince me about music and my personal ability to focus. It needs to be the right music (Emancipator, Nicola Cruz, etc) but I can write 2000 to 5000 lines of high quality, tested code with the right song on repeat for the day and I know its the same for many others.
First, the point of a study is to be generalizeable - that is, to apply to as many people as possible, usually other than oneself. If a particular technique applies to you, that's great! However, most people aren't you. Starting with a known general principle/technique (most people can't multitask) will, on average, put you in a better position than randomly picking someone's anecdotal evidence.
Second, there are many documented cases where self-assessment of one's own traits or capabilities is inaccurate. Performance while cognitively impaired (alcohol & sleep deprivation), assessment of skill as a novice (Dunning-Kruger), and the ability to multitask are all well-known cases of it, with many more lesser known (e.g. whether one is a "visual" or "verbal" learner[1]) - so, you should be wary about having too much self-confidence in your own capabilities, especially for something as poorly-understood as software engineering.
> First, the point of a study is to be generalizeable
That's why I specified myself. I completely understand the difference between generalizable results and individual results.
> many documented cases where self-assessment of one's own traits or capabilities is inaccurate
I completely understand that self-assessment is flawed, but there is also something to understanding oneself and trusting a self-assessment that is born out over decades of experience. I have never even come close to being as productive as I can be with the right musical piece and sharing this insight with others may prompt further research that sheds new nuance on the topic.
that's the key. You are possibly using 'the right song' to isolate yourself, so that helps you concentrate. The fact that it's on repeat also makes you don't pay much attention to it anymore. But try to listen to 'the wrong song', or worse 'the wrong new song', and it's probably going to have some effect.
I mostly listen to 'concentration music' and lo-fi without vocals. Put something more complex and with lyrics...
I used to find that listening to music without lyrics (classical, movie themes, etc.) did it. Lately though I just listen to a local radio station that plays music I like.
I think I'm convinced that the difference is how well I know the music - listening to the radio is all songs that I've heard hundreds of times, so I don't think I'm subconsciously spending effort listening to the lyrics since I know them already?
For me my poor English becomes an advantage here - I can listen to rock music and completely ignore lyrics, if they are in English and I don't deliberately focus on them. But if the radio starts playing something in my own language then it becomes distracting, even if I heard the song hundreds times before.
For me music is quite different than speech. Background music helps focus. Background speech kills it. Basically my brain tracks one or other source. Either I follow the podcast that's playing, and totally ignore the work task, or vice-versa.
Not novel to me personally at all but I know that other people claim (perhaps rightfully so) that music helps them concentrate.
I can't. Especially not with repetitive, melodic music like other siblings say helps them. That's an absolute killer as I starts repeating the melody in my head. Potentially even after I shut the music itself off.
My suspicion is that many people have too many other distractions and music helps them because it's less distracting than the other things. Some people say white noise, such as from an AC helps them sleep. It drives me crazy and I can't fall asleep at all. It does beat a busy street with cars zooming by, revving, honking etc.
Where music can help if there's a mundane repetitive task I need to just get done, because automating it does not make sense at that point. Certain music helps. Allegedly farmers use the same technique to make strawberry pickers faster.
Have you never heard of or witnessed people that turn off their car stereo when they need to drive backwards?
Different people are different? I can focus and be productive while watching tv shows or listening to music - but I frequently miss things in the show (which I’m ok with), and I know people who just can’t even have it on nearby without it distracting them from the task.
That's half my point, yes. Plus the fact that many many people probably just claim it helps them concentrate because it helps them drown out worse distractions. If these other distractions didn't exist, the music however would make it worse. Unfortunately though you can also get used to a certain noise floor though and if that noise floor is gone, that's uncomfortable in its own right. If you've never been, try to find one of those complete silence rooms where even your footsteps 'disappear'. It's deafening.
Your TV example I think shows some of this very nicely. You are able to drown out the TV in your head but you aren't able to actually multitask. If you were, you'd know what went on in the show and also get your task done productively. Unless the TV itself drowns out other more distracting things, just not having the TV on would probably be better for concentration.
YMMV in case you are so used to all the noise that you need "something there" because otherwise you get say tinnitus.
I do the TV thing too sometimes but inadvertently. I watch TV, am a little bored perhaps and start say reading HN and at some point notice that the show is over. I totally drowned out the show.
Music keeps my mind destracted enough that i don't get bored quickly and can enter the "flow state". If i get stuck i stop the music because it does negatively affect my ability to solve complex problems. Once i planned how to proceed, my music impaired brain is capable enough to finish the job.
for me it works… sort of. the music helps me concentrate, but that’s only because it eliminates the background noise. i would rather have silence, but this can’t happen when almost everywhere you get open offices. so i guess it’s both, it’s worse than silence but it’s better than what open office provides.
When this has come up before there are always a couple people who say they can't listen to music in a language they know, but listening to another language doesn't bother them.
For me, and one of the reasons I HATE open office plans, I cannot focus if I can almost hear a conversation. Speaking at a normal tone would be far less distracting. Similarly, someone is speaking in a language with too many borrow words in English. Overhearing Germanic languages in particular, my brain keeps trying to treat it like an English speaker with mush-mouth or having a stroke. If I just squeeze my brain harder with my furrowed brow, it will all make sense.
> > Other studies suggest that people who frequently “media multitask” (like listening to music while checking email or scrolling through social media while watching a movie) are more distracted and less able to focus their attention even when they’re performing only one task.
>
> This was novel to me. Listening to music negatively affects your ability to focus? I guess it's time to throw out my headphones...
The part about Movies and Social media makes sense. They are both "heavy" tasks, so they each have their demand. But Music? I would say it depends on the music. Some is distracting, some not. There is optimized music for concentration, usually found in video games. But there is also "heavy" music that demands your attention, IMHO usually those with lyrics, especially inspirational lyrics.
I'm curious whether they checked the type of music in those studies.
I'm one of the worst when it comes to media multitasking, I actually watch uncut full-length stream archives at my own leisure alongside podcasts and whatever new music is out. A lot of it is knowing when to listen, not what. It's a lot easier to focus when you designate the music for work time, the podcasts for transit, and the streams for laundry-folding. I found it very liberating when I realized that I could really consume whatever media I wanted, as long as I made sure to fill the appropriate times with things I like.
I wonder if it comes down to the intentional, sustained focus of ones attention?
Or how does an open office compare to listening to music?
For me I sometimes use music to mollify ruminative thoughts or feelings that intrude and distract me. Which results in a net increase in focus. Similar for the din of the open office.
When I need deep thinking time both background noise and music are too interruptive or distracting and I need full silence. But I don’t require that level of focus all the time.
It seems like this would also be task dependent. I've read other studies that listening to music while running helps people run longer, as an example. I know when I (used to) lift weights -- having the right music was a huge motivational factor for heavy lifts.
For activities that require more intellectual attention, the articles assertion would be accurate to me personally.
"I think that multitasking between multiple tasks has been somewhat-generally known to not be possible (for most people) for a while now"
But what is a task? You emphasize the term and I have a general concept of what a task is in work and other contexts. But that seems too fluid to make broad statements about human behavior - even with studies combining two activities. How do we know one person's doing a task isn't another person's multitasking? It's intuitively plausible that two activities logically will be somewhat harder than doing each in sequence. But are all such combinations identical? A lot of challenging activities do involve the combination of subtasks - firefighters might break into a building looking for survivors while monitoring the situation of the building for safety. Just about any video involves satisfying multiple constraint simulateously, if they didn't, they'd be boring, etc.
Years ago I read a story from a new animator studying with one of the "Nine Old Men" from Disney, considered to be masters of animation. The student asked his teacher what music he listens to while he animates. The teacher roars back something like, 'I'm not smart enough to do two things at the same time!' Unfortunately I cannot locate the book with this story to get the exact quote.
I've told this story to numerous people over the years and every last one of them dismissed it. 'I'm different' or 'actually I'm more focused when I listen to music.' Because additional sensory stimulus somehow allows your brain to dedicate more resources to your primary focus? We are so sure that we are achieving our full potential.
Found it. From The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams. It is so important that it's lesson one! Abridged:
Unplug! Take off your head phones! .... Close the door.
Like many artists, I had the habit of listening to classical music or jazz while working. On one of my first visits to Milt Kahl I innocently asked:
"Milt, Do you ever listen to classical music while you're working?"
"[Expletives]...! I'm not smart enough to think of more than one thing at a time!"
Since it came from a genius, this made quite an impression on me. After this I learnt to face the silence and think before swirling my pencil around. My animation improved right away.
This has been the case with many artists when I've passed this wisdom along. .... They were even more surprised at the startling improvement in their work.
[Image of artist with shirt that reads, "animation is concentration"]
In my experience, music and noise generators help, but silence (and a clean desk, both literally and in terms of visual distraction) helps more.
Music, to me, seems to be the perfumed room deodorizer of noisy environments - it drowns out something that’s a problem rather than lending concentration. I understand why people use it in open workspaces.
When running or exercising music is great because it distracts the conscious mind and lets you avoid getting lost in thought. I think this is the same task it serves when, for example, coding. But hard tasks require that otherwise distracted mind and that’s where it falls apart.
> I think that multitasking between multiple tasks has been somewhat-generally known to not be possible (for most people) for a while now. However, this part of the article was novel:
There is no actual definition of what would constitute a “task” here and that alone makes all of it quite dubious in the way you outline and any other things in how it's often extrapolated.
>> like listening to music while checking email or scrolling through social media while watching a movie
These are definitely not all same, unless you're literally just spinning the mouse wheel like a fidget spinner or watching a Fast & Furious movie. Even more complex music isn't the same as ambient or generic background music.
There was a time in my life (when I owned a desktop) that I would listen to music, play a livestream, play a video game cooperatively, and voice chat with my cooperative partner.
It was the perfect stimulation that would have me focused deeply on the conversation as the gameplay was the topic du jour. It came second-nature.
What is "listening" to music though. I remember multiple instances where I put on a Spotify playlist or an album, and went into full-focus for 2hrs, only to realize that I disabled looping and I have actually not heard any music for half the time at least.
I find that music with lyrics is almost as distracting as people trying to talk to me. But music without lyrics is great to keep me awake. So I guess estimating the true effect of music on productivity will have a lot of variables that need to be accounted for.
I find that I can focus better if I listen to a single track on repeat (I've done it literally for hours). The repetition helps for some reason because you're not surprised.
That's not to say other areas are better by default. There is just a lot of junk science out there. "Study says X" is meaningless to me personally. "Study X was reproduced by A, B, C" is something I'd take notice of.
People have different ways their brain is wired. What’s absurd for you doesn’t make it a good test for universal experience.
Trance is distracting for me, but melodic progression works well for me, and sometimes vocal chillout trance. I still have to process random stuff with background noise from an urban setting, even on one of those noise generators.
Back when I was living in a more rural setting, the song birds, the wind between the trees, the rain makes for something that is easier for me to focus.
That is what works for me. My wife has difficulty concentrating without Netflix in the background.
Given how many people are saying that they need music to concentrate, I was thinking something along the same lines and realized that listening to music doesn't necessarily contradict the study. It may simply be a case of people using music to pull their attention back to the task at hand in cases where the environment would pull their attention away.
As someone with ADHD, the background noise of real life is really distracting to me. I need noise cancellation headphones which play no sound to really deeply focus.
I've organized my life in such a way that I deliberately avoid multi-tasking since I read years ago that it doesn't work, and have proven to myself over the years that it doesn't work. YMMV. One thing I have done is introduce friction into my workflow. So I have a dedicated hard-drive that I boot into that is strictly for coding. Another is strictly for news & social media. This way if I'm coding, I am less likely to slide into Hackernews/Reddit/Twitter/Whatever. Friction is good and more people need to leverage it.
> So I have a dedicated hard-drive that I boot into that is strictly for coding. Another is strictly for news & social media. This way if I'm coding, I am less likely to slide into Hackernews/Reddit/Twitter/Whatever. Friction is good and more people need to leverage it.
But then you're also less likely to get back to work once you are in social media, aren't you?
I don't think that would be a problem unless you often find yourself absent mindedly almost accidentally starting to work when you mean to be taking a break.
I'm fairly certain you do multitask in someone's definition thereof; you have simply defined what you are doing as “one task” and someone else might disagree and this alone makes me suspect of all literature on this matter.
I once worked with a mathematician in a research group who said, "Multitasking destroys me". I did not know what he meant at the time, but I do now.
If your job is to be "on the bottom of things" doing careful calculations and designs, you should not multitask. But if your job is to be "on top of things", then you will have to.
Can't mix the two safely.
You do not want the engineer/architect calculating the load on a beam to be checking email, on slack, answering the phone and other "on top of things" tasks.
But some managers think you are a slacker if you are not running around with your hair on fire at all times. They don't understand the difference.
And I’m fairly sure I would perform much better at university if the courses were exactly the same, just serial. I really like getting to the very depth of an interesting subject, but doing a few hours a week of one will simply kill my brain. As soon as it finds it interesting, it has to context switch to the next one.
Education disruption: Serial University where you can take a course at a time, spending all your available time on that course, completing the work in much less than a quarter or semester if you like. Graduation from SU should result in a degree or it's no better than every other self-study option available at the moment.
That is an interesting way to describe it and makes a lot of sense. One thing that I see discussed a lot is a question of value. Engineers message each other across the day lots of times and it causes the same multitasking issues and break of concentration for "bottom of things". However, sometimes that may unblock two other engineers for several days of productive work. This is where structure matters. Having a tech lead that can handle all these interruptions is ideal but it takes someone who can balance the managing and the execution. It is also the mark of a good manager; someone who understands that their success is actually to make everyone else successful and that means shielding them from the nonsense.
Whenever these studies come up, it makes me wonder "how exactly are they defining task and multi-task here".
For example, driving involves keeping the car at a reasonable, avoiding obstacles on and off the road, deciding whether you need to turn soon, noticing the condition of the vehicle and related things. These could all be considered tasks and are indeed difficult to keep straight when one begins driving. But they can indeed be done together. And while it might be easier to somehow do each separately, the combined task of driving isn't possible without this "multitasking".
I understand that nearly everyone talking about multitasking here is referencing whether or not tasks at work can be efficiently combined. But I don't think that addresses the larger issues (what's a single task, when two tasks intersect, how can you not multitask, is the difficulty of "multitasking" a limitation of humans or is it that the task itself becomes inherently more difficult).
(1) If you are a software dev you probably have a process that involves waiting for compiles, builds, downloads, etc. At the very least you have to have one thing you do when you are waiting.
(2) Frequently people multitask to manage their emotions. It is like having a choice between a room that is too cold and too hot and you can be comfortable moving from one to the other.
To expand on (1). Preemptive multitasking is the one that doesn’t work very well because it interrupts your flow and the cost of context switching is high. Cooperative multitasking is fantastic since you only task switch when you’re blocked.
For #1, I try to pick a task that's closely related to the main task at hand. I think related tasks can help retain focus rather than losing it by shifting gears.
For example, while my code is compiling, I might think through the specific steps I'm going to take to try it out when I run it here in a minute. Or try to plan out the next change I'm going to make to the code if this current code works. Or start a list of some unit tests I need to add.
Similar to (1), I somewhat have a process for async discussions.
Sometimes, when I know starting a Slack thread will lead to lots of discussion, I wait until I have mental space to be ready to switch to them. Once those conversations start, it's very hard to concentrate on the current task.
Other times, I know people will take a long time to respond, so I'll kick off those discussions early and be comfortable in being able to context switch away from it when needed.
I don't doubt that multitasking makes us less efficient and more prone to mistakes, but the question is by how much?
Sometimes it might be worth multitasking and being less efficient at both tasks. If I'm washing the dishes and listening to a podcast I'm completely okay if I'm at 80% efficiency at washing the dishes and paying attention to the podcast. Neither activity generally requires all my attention. The same goes for many other activities that we do.
Playing a video game and listening to a lecture is probably still better than just playing the video game. Just don't expect to absorb the lecture as well as you would if you were to fully concentrate on it.
Yeah, I like listening to books when doing household chores, as I can do those almost entirely on autopilot, with very little thought required at all.
I also listen to books when doing hobby woodworking, as most of the time spent is on rather menial tasks like sanding or planing. However, not all of it is like that, and you often need to focus, do some calculation or planning. During those times, I need to pause the book, as I can neither focus on it nor on the task at hand.
Human bodies have lots of ability to multitask, it’s just their brains have very little.
More generally, multitasking can improve your outlook and mental well-being. Mix a fun task with a menial task, and the instantaneous toll of the work balances out better.
World class chess players in tournaments often walk around during the game and do so on their own turn or go to the bar and have a drink.
“I think better when I walk.” is a commonly heard statement; many research scientists when thinking about a problem also take a walk outside and find that thinking while walking improves it.
But in soft science research without any real definitions it's of course quite easy to not incorporate such things because terms have no meaning and then say that “research proves it” while all it did is prove things about their ad hoc definition of “multitasking” which is far removed from the real world.
This looks like a content farm article with no substance.
> Other studies suggest that people who frequently “media multitask” (like listening to music while checking email or scrolling through social media while watching a movie) are more distracted and less able to focus their attention even when they’re performing only one task.
Compared to what? Music for me is usually a way of escaping the hell that can be open spaces.
I multitask precisely as a multitasking OS does. It works reasonably well. This is to say, I do focus on one thing at a time and task-switch. When I task switch I store the state information I need to return to the prior task.
I generally keep a text document open all the time. When I have to task switch I write down where I am leaving the current task and what I have to do when I come back. Sometimes it is a couple of lines of text. Other times I have to add more to it.
For me this works very well. It avoids the issue of an interruption or having to deal with multiple things in a day killing your productivity because it takes an hour to get your brain back into the prior task.
Simple. Effective. At the end of the day it looks like you did multiple things simultaneously, just like a multitasking OS. In other words, my system tick is >= 1 hour, not milliseconds.
> I do however feel a great sense of accomplishment whenever I have several browser windows open while I work though. :|
This is a subtle point. I can easily have 10 tabs open and swap between them while mono-tasking. E.g — ignoring for a moment the fact I'm writing on HN... — right now I have 4 tabs open on Sentry, where I'm comparing stack traces for a couple of instances of two related errors. I have another tab on the relevant PR, and a few more with docs pages for the relevant APIs/libraries. Swapping between these things isn't multitasking, it's just managing the complexity of the one single task.
Hasn't this been debunked for a while? To prove this all you need to do is have test subjects listen to a podcast or audiobook and then distract them with something for a second or two and the results will undoubtedly show that the vast majority of listeners stopped paying attention and what was heard was not comprehended/absorbed. Humans tend to think they are capable of more than they really are.
I can write a comment on hackernews and have a verbal conversation at the same time (i.e. typing noises happen when mouth noises happen, no pausing or swapping) just fine. If that's not multitasking, I don't know what is. I will grant you most folks I've met or asked about it cannot do it.
That works more like your brain feeding in a few words, and typing itself is muscle memory that requires no active attention. If a word doesn’t look right, it “throws an interrupt”, and you will look into it with active thought, and then quickly returning to your speech — which yet again can talk “automatically”, while it has a full buffer.
Pretty much the exact same way as modern hardware works.
There are two options: Either you made this up out of whole cloth, or you are decades ahead of neuroscience and have single-handedly managed to find a way to prove how brains work. I think the former is a lot more plausible.
What’s interesting is you can see the seperate patterns on an fmri. It’s also known that people advanced in certain kinds of meditation are very likely to show dual gamma waves. I think it’s suspected that it’s something that can be trained, although it’s very possible only people with the ability are drawn to practice these meditations.
Well, I've been looking, and mostly what I've been able to find is references to papers that show strong correlation with Buddhist monks and exceptional gamma waves. The paper I'm thinking of may have not been reproducible, and fallen off the radar. I would have seen it no later than 2011. I might be quoting a book on neuroscience as well (I went through a phase where I was looking at neuroscience for inspiration for AI research). I think the idea was that people who meditate while doing certain types of "mindless" tasks seem to be able to hold 1 wave around that task, while holding another wave around other thoughts. What I can't remember is if this was a one gamma wave per hemisphere scenario, or 2 for the whole brain.
If you're interested at least in consciousness and brain waves, you could do worse than to look into reading some of the references in "States of Consciousness: Experimental Insights into Meditation, Waking, Sleep and Dreams" Dean Cvetkovic & Irena Cosic Editors
As someone who fights with ADHD, I strive to intentionally single-task. It doesn't always work, but not having to keep several things in the forefront of my mind make it more possible to be productive.
Alarms and lists serve as my task manager, since my brain fails at it by default.
Curious, are you able to have parallel thought streams?
I know two people who can, and they both have ADD. (But when I asked around, many others who have ADD can’t, though they are capable of fast context switching).
My wife has to have something occupy one thought stream on a sensory channel in order to focus on the something she really wants to focus on on a separate channel. She usually runs three or four.
A friend knows how to fork and merge parallel streams at will, but can get bored. The mental intensity he can achieve when all of his streams merge is much greater than typical. He tells me he’d run podcasts at 4x or something while he works on other stuff.
While I agree with the article, this paragraph is, erm, a distraction:
> Other studies suggest that people who frequently “media multitask” (like listening to music while checking email or scrolling through social media while watching a movie) are more distracted and less able to focus their attention even when they’re performing only one task
The causality could just as well run the other way: people with poor focus adherence presumnly exhibit it regardless of the amount of distraction.
It's certainly true, in my experience, that trying to do two or more things "at once" disrupt my focus and increase my error rate, but I think that high level gloss on the situation is unhelpful for technology workers.
Of course, if I ever had the opportunity to work on a single task, I can be very productive at that. Easiest way to get into flow state. However, that isn't common for my work. Often, instead, I am working on something that crosses many boundaries and has unavoidable downtime. For instance, right now I am working on visualizing erlang processes using Phoenix and d3js to see if I can detect unusual memory use growth. I'm going back and forth between erlang docs and Phoenix views and elixir code and javascript (with, of course, lots of reading and searching in between). I have no idea if that's multitasking, but when I have to move from one layer to another I experience the same kind of disruption and need to refocus as I do when I'm interrupted.
Another quality of multi-tasking that I frequently experience is the difference between needing to respond to external stimulus v.s. being able to orchestrate multiple processes to run in parallel. They both involve context switching and loss of focus, but there are huge differences in the order of magnitude.
I pretty much tune out any article that starts out "studies show". When it comes to soft metrics like "productivity", studies show whatever you want them to show.
How many studies never saw the light of day because the result was uninteresting, or ran counter to the narrative the study's author wanted to put out?
I feel like I never quite got the answer of why it doesn't work. It's also pretty nuanced.
If I have laundry, dishwashing, etc going. I am multitasking but I don't need to expend attention.
So there's certainly a threshold where multitasking becomes a problem.
In MSP world, I didn't control my own schedule. If the schedulers thought I only needed 30 minutes to do a 3 hour task. That's all you got. Some coworkers would hard limit. Put the 30 minutes in and leave the job unfinished.
The stated rule was double/triple billing; which is a felony but you know they'll throw you to the wolves if you actually break the law and get caught. However, the rule was that if you needed more time. You had to work on multiple things at once. If you did not accomplish a task, you had to set the ticket back with justification why you didn't get it done. About 25% of the time if you didnt get it done and put in a justification. Someone would come talk with you.
Once it’s a habit, it is automatically executed without active attention, so the majority of your daily routine is simply not an activity you “partake in”.
My wife has ADD. Along with one other person I know (who also has ADD), she can have parallel thoughts, ordinary, about 3 or 4 concurrent tasks, usually split along sensory modalities. She can multitask. The closest I have come to multitasking was on the rare occasions, I drink coffee, and that’s more of a predictive optimization and pipelining rather than multitasking.
I have asked around of other people who have ADD, and they don’t report parallel thoughts, just very fast context switching.
I definitely feel like I'm generally less productive when I have music on for a majority of things, though I will put on headphones with one key exception: if the noise the headphones tune out is more distracting than the music I would be listening to.
Though typically when I do put on music to work, it's old Amiga soundtracks or something. I wonder how much the difference in levels of distraction for lyrics vs. no lyrics.
I think there's a big difference between lyrics vs no lyrics, as well as known vs unknown music. I have a much harder time not paying attention to the lyrics (or even melody of an instrumental song) that i know well than music I haven't heard before.
Define multitasking. Programming and debugging at the same time can hardly count as being unproductive. Or keeping an eye out for your kid in the playground while talking to a hot mom. Or being mindful or how long you've been frying your fishsticks and what you're going to put in the salad.
I worked for a millennial once and multitask was his favorite word. Tried it for awhile but I made way more mistakes. Course he rode me for those mistakes.
So I only pretended to multitask and my error rate plummeted. Does each generation have to figure this out on their own?
I feel like I've written good code while listening to online seminars in the background (and having retained important parts from it). I believed it to be because I use my visual faculties when coding and it doesn't interfere with my auditory channels.
Its kind of cool seeing this reality become known by more and more people to the point where I think most people kind of understand this now. Just a small piece of evidence for this is the resurgence, and regaining popularity, of the one monitor workflow.
If only a hundred million bonehead "managers" understood this concept. They still think they can multitask their way to free FTEs materializing out of nothing.
I think its sort of a madeup term. I don't think emergent phenomenon can be divided into "tasks" the way we think of them in the real world. If as you're thinking on a task you're also recalling prior memories - is that multi tasking?
according to my experience human multitasking can work until tasks do not conflict which of your "peripherial" they want to use. ie. people can think and talk while peeling potato.
but often they can not effectively type on the computer and talk about something else.
This has been known and demonstrated for decades, but we're still ordered to do it anyway. If I were more of a conspiracy theory type I would think that Machiavellian managers demand multitasking precisely because they know that it does cause problems that they can blame on their underlings later whenever anything goes wrong so they come out looking great. But that would be crazy talk, of course.
I haven’t read the article, but the title irrefutably contradicts a very interesting understanding of multitasking shared by Dr. Andrew Huberman on the Huberman Lab podcast.
Maybe by being provocative and choosing an absolute position on the matter, the author was hoping to attract readers.
For those interested in the explanation given by Huberman, skip to the section titled “Multi-Tasking Is Real” found in the description of the video [0].
It has to do with whether or not the person being tested is right brain dominant or left brain dominant. The vast majority of people are left brain dominant and for them multitasking is extremely difficult because of the linear sequential nature of the left hemisphere.
Right brained people, those with the right brain dominant over the left, have an easier time multitasking because the right brain is image oriented. The right brain processes information as images are processed, In a visual simultaneous manner.
There's debate on the left-brain/right-brain model, which I think has been somewhat debunked[1][2]
That being said, brains are weird and if you find you can multitask then go for it. I've gathered data on my own attempts to multitask and established that I cannot.
> Other studies suggest that people who frequently “media multitask” (like listening to music while checking email or scrolling through social media while watching a movie) are more distracted and less able to focus their attention even when they’re performing only one task.
This was novel to me. Listening to music negatively affects your ability to focus? I guess it's time to throw out my headphones...
Well, but that article links to "Multicosts of Multitasking"[1], which references studies made on "heavy multitaskers", defined as having high "MMI" scores. What's MMI?
"A high MMI score means an individual engages in a lot of media multitasking (e.g., checking email while also perusing Facebook and watching Netflix), and a low score means he or she does not (e.g., checking email without any secondary media)."
Whoa there - checking Netflix and Facebook are completely different than listening to music, and it should be obvious that the former two are mutually exclusive with performing other tasks (simultaneously) - but that doesn't imply the same for music.
I think that the HN submission page might be making some unsupported claims...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7075496/